Ira Glass on Dreams, Nightmares and ‘Sleepwalk With Me’

In a particularly dramatic sequence in the new film, “Sleepwalk With Me,” an aspiring comedian named Matt Pandamiglio dreams he’s the target of a missile attack. He runs for his life to escape imminent doom. The incident required 33 stitches. That’s because Matt, like the film’s director/lead actor Mike Birbiglia, suffers from REM sleep behavior disorder, a serious condition in which people act out their dreams. (In attempting to evade the deadly projectile, Matt jumped through a closed, second-story window.)

The film, Mr. Birbiglia’s directorial debut, was adapted from his successful one-man show. It was later turned into a book called “Sleepwalk with Me and Other Painfully True Stories.” The movie version, which won an audience award at the Sundance Film Festival, comes out on Aug. 24 in select theaters and on demand.

Many of the anecdotes dramatized in the film have also been told on Mr. Birbiglia’s comedy albums, and on the radio: The window-jumping episode, which happened while he was on tour in Walla Walla, Wash., was first broadcast to a wide audience in 2008 on the public radio show “This American Life.” After that, Mr. Birbiglia became a regular contributor on the program, working closely with host Ira Glass, who would become a producer and co-screenwriter on the film.

Now that Mr. Birbiglia’s stories have been told in every conceivable format, we wonder, what’s next? An opera? A Broadway musical?